New Berry, Fresenius bonds firmer; Cablevision slides on Altice news; funds gain $236 million

By Paul Deckelman and Paul A. Harris

New York, Sept. 17 – No new issues priced in the high-yield market on Thursday – but traders said that Wednesday’s offering of seven-year secured notes from packaging maker Berry Plastics Group, Inc. firmed smartly in heavy trading.

They also saw a respectable amount of activity in Wednesday’s other new deal – the 7.25-year notes from healthcare provider Fresenius SE & Co. KGaA, which also traded above their issue price.

However, last Friday’s big deal from Frontier Communications Corp. remained well below the peak levels seen after the wireline telecom company’s huge three-part deal had priced.

The primaryside meantime buzzed with talk about a big new bond deal that will partially finance European cable operator Altice NV’s planned acquisition of U.S.-based sector peer Cablevision Systems Corp. in a transaction valued at over $17 billion, including debt. The bank debt portion of that financing is scheduled to launch next week; however, the size and precise timing of the bond portion of the financing remains nebulous.

News of that gigantic takeover and the prospect of sizable new debt sent Cablevison’s existing bonds and those of its CSC Holdings LLC financing subsidiary into a tailspin, with sizable volume on several of those credits. Several issues of Altice’s bonds were also lower.

Overall, traders said the announcement by the Federal Reserve that it would hold interest rates where they are for now rather than starting to raise them at this time – a raise that some observers had predicted might emerge from the central bank’s two-day meeting – proved to be a positive for junk, along with other fixed-income markets.

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